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A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word ''water'' is composed of two syllables: ''wa'' and ''ter''. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns. Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".〔Geoffrey Blainey, ''A Short History of the World'', p.87, citing J.T. Hooker et al., ''Reading the Past: Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to the Alphabet'', British Museum, 1993, Ch. 2〕 A word that consists of a single syllable (like English ''dog'') is called a monosyllable (and is said to be ''monosyllabic''). Similar terms include disyllable (and ''disyllabic'') for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and ''trisyllabic'') for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and ''polysyllabic''), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable. ==Etymology== ''Syllable'' is a Anglo-Norman variation of Old French ''sillabe'', from Latin ''syllaba'', from Koine Greek (unicode:''syllabḗ'') . means "what is taken together", referring to letters that are taken together to make a single sound. is a verbal noun from the verb (unicode:''syllambánō''), a compound of the preposition (unicode:''sýn'') "with" and the verb (unicode:''lambánō'') "take". The noun uses the root , which appears in the aorist tense; the present tense stem is formed by adding a nasal infix before the (unicode:''b'') and a suffix (unicode:''-an'') at the end. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「syllable」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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